Our mortgage is without a doubt a huge debt granted it is placed against the house with itself is an asset.
It feels like a big cloud hanging over our shoulder on our journey to retirement, with us not being able to retire early whilst we have the mortgage.
The biggest goal for us is to use our home as part of our retirement. In the end, we are always going to downsize and move home to a smaller home as part of our retirement plan. However, this is only worth it to us if we can clear our mortgage and start saving the mortgage payment for a plan of early retirement. With the government moving our retirement age to currently 68, it is a long way off for us both. Our aim is and always will be to have a kitty to see us through from 60 – 68 when we are able to draw our pensions.
With the housing market having a little wobble at the minute, we have decided not to rush any decisions we make at the moment. We have had so many chats about where our next steps are and as we stand there are a few options available for us.
- Stay where we are, put up with the few annoying bits that happen here and keep overpaying the mortgage so it is cleared as soon as possible.
- Move to a house locally, increasing our mortgage to get more space than we need however staying local for the children to be able to stay in their schools and eventually college.
- Move out of our town to a larger house for space but save us some money. This is a great option however as a parent I feel bad moving the kids at this point in the school journey so it would require us to travel back in and out.
I genuinely do not know what our plans will be when we eventually get to a position for us to make the decision. We are not in the position to make a decision yet as our plan is to have as much capital in our home as we can before we make that decision but also ensure our debts are as minimal as they can be at that point. In the next 3-5 years, we will be in that position to start making permanent plans and if 2020 has taught me anything it is not to take anything for granted.
You can plan everything down to the minor details, however, life does its own thing and sometimes you have to roll with it, take 2020 as the perfect example!
Regardless of whether we move or not, the long term plan is to get this mortgage down as much as we can and we have started this by increasing our monthly overpayments on our mortgage.
